THE NATURE of NURSING Phil Barker Nurses
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THE NATURE OF NURSING Phil Barker Nurses: Still invisible after all these years When people have a ‘mental breakdown’, the Hollywood film drops them into the arms of a brilliant, humane and invariably caring psychiatrist1. Nurses, by contrast are invisible or, as de Carlo noted, they occupy an “aberrant, secret, and dangerous world” where their role is mainly that of ‘custodial companionship’2. If Nightingale was the icon for physical care nursing then, Nurse Ratched, from ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’, has become the mental health nursing icon3. Real life tells a different story. In hospital or community care, psychiatrists are few in number, and only fleetingly present at the care face†. In the ‘real world’ nurses are the only caring constant4. Despite the media hype, when people talk about their ‘recovery’ from mental illness, they rarely name doctors, psychotherapy or even drugs. Instead, they talk about support, comfort, presence and other "human" stuff, 5 which they believe sustained them on their recovery journey. They thank people who offered extraordinary human support, who nourished their souls. Apart from friends, families and other ‘patients’, invariably they thank nurses. This should not surprise us since ‘psychotherapy’ originally meant the ‘healing of the soul (or spirit)’, and nursing, originally meant ‘to nourish’. Some years ago, I had the privilege of spending time with Pat Deegan6, the famous American psychologist, survivor and key proponent of ‘recovery’ in mental health7. We discussed her original ‘breakdown’, when she was diagnosed as a "chronic schizophrenic" at 20 years of age and told “not to hope for much”. Her recovery really began when she was discharged from hospital to a boarding house, where she roomed with "a bunch of hippies". This "assortment of oddballs" supported her as she wrestled with her demons. "They treated me like a person, not a patient," Pat recalled. Their caring acceptance appeared to kick start a process in which Pat began to care for, and also accept herself, for who she was. Although she went on to become a psychologist, rather than a nurse, her work emphasises the social construct of nursing8: how to support people in facing life's challenges; how to help them grow and develop as people. For Pat Deegan, what “made a difference” was being accepted as “just another human being”, albeit with some problems in living. Those around her ‘nursed’ her in the most traditional manner, helping her to live and grow, from day to day. Ironically, this caring attitude was miles away from the kind of ‘care’ she had known as a hospital ‘patient’. There are however, many encouraging signs, that nurses are beginning to reclaim ‘genuine nursing’ with all its human and social values. † Nurses often talk about the ‘realities’ of their everyday work as the ‘coal face’, implying that this is hard and dirty work. However, nurses have to ‘get close’ to the people in their care, becoming a recognisable face that the person comes to trust. In that sense, it might be more realistic to talk about the ‘front line’ of nursing as the care face. What is Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing? In 2007, my colleague Poppy Buchanan-Barker and I tried to clarify the concept of PMHN and what it involved in practice. We asked nurses from different countries to tell us: ‘what is psychiatric and mental health nursing?’ and ‘how do PMH nurses do nursing?’ To help them provide a brief answer we supplied examples of two line definitions of medicine, psychology and social work, drawn from the internet, and asked a range of practitioners, leaders, researchers and professors - to define and describe their discipline in simple language. Most replied saying that they needed “time to think about this”. Some needed weeks, others needed months, to come up with an answer. A few said such a definition couldn’t be done, or for various philosophical reasons, shouldn’t be done. Almost all admitted that these were difficult questions9. However, lay people were more forthcoming: Nurses help people; Nurses relieve a person’s distress; Nurses help people get through the day, and through the night. Nurses help people ‘deal with stuff…all sorts of stuff’10 However, behind these obvious, if not common-sense descriptions, lies a wealth of hotly-disputed debate, concerning: what is (or is not) nursing; the proper focus of nursing11; and the often subtle difference between care and treatment. Maybe the nurses we involved in our study were trying to define PMHN as a professional idea, whereas the lay people described this as a human or social service. Few of the nurses in our study referred to caring or care, except in very general terms – such as ‘nurses give nursing care’, which is rather like saying ‘doctors practise medicine’. However, one professor of nursing from the USA said that the field was divided into two ‘camps’. i. ” a subservient discipline and an extension of psychiatry's social control mechanism(s), for the policing, containment and correction of already marginalised people”, which carried “out a number of defensive, custodial, uncritical and often iatrogenic practices and treatments, based on a false epistemology and misrepresentation of what are, by and large, 'human problems of being' ,rather than so-called 'mental illnesses'.” (and) ii. “a specialty craft that operates primarily by working alongside people with mental health problems; helping individuals and their families find ways of coping with the here and now (and past); helping people discover and ascribe individual meaning to their experiences; and exploring opportunities for recovery, reclamation and personal growth - all through the medium of the therapeutic relationship” PMHN – A DEFINITION Of course, nursing was adequately defined over fifty years ago. Nursing is a significant, therapeutic, interpersonal process. It functions co- operatively with other human processes that make health possible for individuals in communities…Nursing is an educative instrument, a maturing force, that aims to promote forward movement of personality in the direction of creative, constructive, productive, personal and community living12. Peplau was defining what nurses focus on doing, and further developed this definition to represent nursing unique focus: Nursing can take as its unique focus the reactions of the patient or client to the circumstances of his illness or health problem.13 Peplau was highly influential in the development of the American Nurses Association’s definition of nursing: Nursing is the diagnosis and treatment of human responses to actual or potential health problems14. The distinction between psychiatric nursing and psychiatric medicine was clear cut for Peplau. The nurse’s primary responsibility was to nurture and aid patients in their personal development through nursing services; helping “guide patients in the direction of understanding and resolving their human dilemmas15”. The nurse’s secondary responsibilities include co-operating with physicians who prescribe psychiatric treatments for patients”16. Regrettably, in recent years, many PMH nurses have focused their attention on these secondary responsibilities. Some even assume that by emulating the work of their medical colleagues – e.g. by increasing their involvement in psychiatric diagnosis or prescribing of medication – they are ‘advancing’ the practice of nursing. What is the purpose of nursing? I have, for many years endorsed both the ANA definition of nursing and Peplau’s description of the ‘proper focus’ of psychiatric nursing. However, although the focus of nursing is clear, its purpose – what it was for – appeared less clear. Almost 20 years ago I tried to extend Peplau’s original definition, by defining the purpose of nursing as trephotaxis – from the Greek, meaning ‘the provision of the necessary conditions for the promotion of growth and development’. When nurses help people explore their distress, in an attempt to discover ways of remedying or ameliorating it, they are practicing psychiatric nursing. When nurses help the same people explore ways of growing and developing, as persons, exploring how they presently live with and might move beyond, their problems of living, they are practicing mental health nursing. These two forms of caring practice are closely related, with a highly fluid border separating them. The former might be seen as problem-focused or situation-specific, whereas the latter is more holistic: concerned with the person’s life - how it is lived, along with its many inherent meanings. By emphasising the purpose of nursing, rather than its many different processes, more emphasis is given to the developmental and educative aspects of nursing, first described by Peplau. However, nurses do not ‘make’ people develop, far less ‘change’ them; neither do they ‘teach’ them anything directly. Instead, they provide the conditions necessary for the person to experience growth, development and change, and to learn something of significance from their own experience17. Emotional Rescue and psychiatric nursing: When people are acutely distressed, under threat – whether physical, psychological or spiritual - or presenting a risk to themselves or others, the high drama of the situation requires an equally dramatic nursing response. Here, the nurse might need to make the person and the environment as physically safe and emotionally secure as possible. This requires great skill and composure on the nurse’s part. Such dramatic help is akin to the work of the lifesaver rescuing someone from drowning, or the fire-fighter delivering a person from a burning building. When people are suicidal or tormented by ‘voices’ they require just this kind of ‘emotional rescue’. In such a situation: The nurse provides the kind of supportive conditions that will reduce the experience of distress and prepare the way for a more detailed examination of what needs to be done next. When nurses respond to people’s distress by helping to contain it, delimit it, or otherwise fix it, they are practising psychiatric nursing.